Help Us Find
helps creditors collect on overdue child support
By Barbara J. Brown
Since the Help Us Find web page of the Maintenance Enforcement Program (MEP) was implemented in November 2000, the program has located more than half the debtors who were posted on the site.
"We found them in a number of places - 26 in Alberta, two in the United States, three in British Columbia, three in Ontario and one in Manitoba," said Kevin Quail, senior manager of collections for the Maintenance Enforcement Program.
Since the beginning
of the Help Us Find initiative,
55 debtors have been posted on the web site and 35 have been located.
Thirty of those 35 debtors are making maintenance payments. Debtors are
only placed on the site if they are six months in arrears, have had their
files screened by MEP's Special Investigations Unit and can't be found
through MEP's extensive searches.
In total, the 55 debtors owed over $1.9 million for child support. The 21 debtors currently posted on the web page owe over $925,000 in support payments.
| When a hard-to-find
debtor has been located, the Maintenance Enforcement Act authorizes
an enforcement officer in the Maintenance Enforcement Program to take
various actions to satisfy a debt.
An enforcement officer can:
|
Once a debtor has been located, they are immediately removed from the web site, Quail said. The Maintenance Enforcement Program places a high priority on removing debtors' personal information from the Internet, typically within hours of finding them.
"The only purpose of the web page is to locate them. It's not punitive," said Quail.
Of the five remaining debtors who haven't begun making payments yet, two have been reposted on the web page. Exhaustive searches failed to find the debtors, who have disappeared again.
